Manchester - the City in Literature Part 1

People from the North West tend to mythologise their place of birth. This is not a new trend; back in 1835, Honore de Balzac wrote The Lillies of the Valley, in which Lady Arabella Dudley, a Lancastrian, seduces the hero Felix de Vandenesse after telling him that Lancashire is 'the county where ladies die of love'. One can only imagine Monsieur de Vandenesse's sense of wonder at seeing Burnley for the first time. Of course, it's not all romance; it's grim up north, as everyone knows, and some writers prefer to focus on descriptions of pre-war terraces and poverty, but that sense of grandiosity remains the same - other cities may have had slums, but Salford had the 'classic slum'. As a relatively modern city, Manchester doesn't inspire as many works of popular history or cultural study as London, but it is still frequently crops up in literature. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to look at authors who have written about real places and incidents from the city's history, starting with the nineteenth century.

Industrial Strife

Elizabeth Gaskell's house, today

Elizabeth Gaskell lived in Plymouth Grove, in South Manchester - her house is still there, and has now been turned into a visitor centre. Her first novel, Mary Barton, uses two intriguing aspects of Manchester’s history as plot points. The first concerns the shooting of a mill-owner’s son named Harry Carson. The murder occurs on Turner Street, in present-day Clayton, in the east of the city. Modern Clayton isn't anyone's idea of a peaceful idyll, but in Gaskell’s day it was still a relatively rural area; when her heroine visits the scene of the crime, she says ‘it was so quiet and still that she could hardly believe it to be the place… the little birds were beginning to hop and twitter in the leafless hedge, making the only sound that was near and distinct. She crossed into the field where she guessed the murderer to have stood; it was easy of access, for the worn, stunted hawthorn hedge had many gaps in it’. Nearby, she sees a saw-pit and a carpenter’s shed. A policeman describes Turner Street as a ‘lonely, unfrequented way’.

The real-life location of Ashton's murder 

The murder is widely believed to have been inspired by the killing of Thomas Ashton, in 1831. The inquest report states that Ashton, a mill-owner ‘beloved by all the working classes’, was returning to his home in Ashton-under-Lyne when ‘he was shot at by some base assassin, and killed on the spot’. The crime was believed to be politically motivated, as it followed a series of strikes and disruptions in the area. Three years later, following information from an inmate of Derby Gaol, three union men, James Garside, William Mosely and Joseph Mosely were brought to trial – each attempted to blame the others, and despite a lack of any real evidence Garside and James Mosely were convicted and hanged. The Hydonian blog has a series of photos of the site as it appeared at the time, and now.

The novel also touches upon the disturbances known as the Plug Riots, which took place across the north of England and the Midlands in 1842. The riots are better seen as a general strike, provoked by low pay, and also by the government’s refusal to consider the Chartist’s Petition, which had been presented to parliament that year (the document was reportedly signed by over three million people, but it was burned, so we’ll never know if the figure is accurate). Striking workers often removed the plug from the boilers in the factories they were employed by, giving the riots their name. In Manchester, strikers took over control of the city for the best part of a week, before troops arrived to disperse them (in a rare left-wing counterfactual, it is interesting to consider what would have happened if the railways had not been built to connect Manchester and London by this point – soldiers would have taken weeks to arrive, giving the strikers plenty of time to organise a defence of the city).

Gaskell may not have been from the same class as the strikers, but she did have a pretty good grasp of their demands. She summed up the atmosphere of the city: ‘class distrusted class, and their want of mutual confidence wrought sorrow to both. The masters would not be bullied, and compelled to reveal why they felt it wisest and best to offer only such low wages; they would not be made to tell that they were even sacrificing capital to obtain a decisive victory over the continental manufacturers. And the workmen sat silent and stern with folded hands, refusing to work for such pay. There was a strike in Manchester.’

The Plug Riots

The mill-owners tried to employ scab labour from outside the city, and soon ‘power-loom weavers living in the more remote parts of Lancashire, and the neighbouring counties, heard of the masters' advertisements for workmen; and in their solitary dwellings grew weary of starvation, and resolved to come to Manchester. Foot-sore, way-worn, half-starved looking men they were, as they tried to steal into town in the early dawn, before people were astir, or late in the dusk of evening.’ They were set upon by pickets, ‘in spite of magistrates, and prisons, and severe punishments,—the poor depressed men tramping in from Burnley, Padiham, and other places, to work at the condemned "Starvation Prices," were waylaid, and beaten, and left almost for dead by the road-side. The police broke up every lounging knot of men:—they separated quietly, to reunite half-a-mile further out of town.’

Eventually, the police (backed by troops) were able to break the strike, although workers in Lancashire and Staffordshire held out for around a month. In the aftermath of the real Plug Riots, fifteen hundred people were arrested, and seventy nine sentenced to prison or transportation. The loquacious Chartist leader Thomas Cooper used his time in prison to compose the epic poem The Purgatory of Suicides, based on the events of the strike.

Peterloo

Oldham Street, in ye past

Isabella Banks’ 1876 novel The Manchester Man also used a number of events from the city’s history in its narrative. Banks was born in Oldham Street in 1821. Located just off Piccadilly Gardens, in the second half of the nineteenth century Oldham Street became the centre of Manchester’s millinery industry, which might explain why fashion conscious hipsters are drawn there to this day. In his cultural history of the city Manchester, England, Dave Haslam quotes Charles Russell describing the street's already well-established nightlife in 1905: 'on Sunday evenings, there are three main points of attraction for working lads; Oldham Street, Market Street and Stockport Road. From Hulme, from Ardwick and from Ancoats they come in, in the main well-dressed, and frequently sporting a flower in the button-holes of their jackets'. 

Intended as an inspirational and improving novel, The Manchester Man has a suitably romantic view of the city’s history:  ‘When Pliny lost his life, and Herculaneum was buried, Manchester was born. Whilst lava and ashes blotted from sight and memory fair and luxurious Roman cities close to the Capitol, the Roman soldiery of Titus, under their general Agricola, laid the foundations of a distant city which now competes with the great cities of the world. Where now rise forests of tall chimneys, and the hum of whirling spindles, spread the dense woods of Arden;--and from the clearing in their midst rose the Roman castrum of Mamutium, which has left its name of Castle Field as a memorial to us.’

Print depicting the arrest of Hunt and the Hussars' charge

Banks knew her city's history, and was able to include a number of key moments into her narrative. In particular, she gives a detailed account of the Peterloo Massacre, which took place in 1819. A huge crowd (between 60-80,000 people) gathered at St Peter's Field for a demonstration in support of universal sufferage, to be addressed by the orator Henry Hunt. As Hunt began his speech, troops came forward to arrest him; cavalry officers, who are alleged to have been drinking in the city before the event, charged the crowd with sabres drawn. The official death toll was 15, with up to 700 injured, but this is likely to be a serious underestimate. 

Banks may have been influenced by the radical poet Samuel Bamford's recollections of Peterloo, and she mentions Bamford by name in her account of the day. At 9am, she says, 'people began to assemble from all quarters on the open ground near St Peter's Church - not bloodthirsty roughs but men, women and children, drawn thither for a sight of a holiday spectacle'. Chartists carefully choreographed their processions to demonstrate their peaceful nature, placing women and children at the front of the crowd. The marchers are joined by working people from the satellite towns, 'walking in procession with bugles playing and gay banners flying, though they might look haggard, pinched and careworn'. The procession passes through Oldham Street, presumably walking past the author's own birthplace, and along Mosley Street, location of the Manchester Art Gallery today.

Her description of the scene at St Peter's Field is graphic; the Hussars come 'galloping round the corner... and threw themselves, men and horse, upon the closely packed mass without a note of warning. [The Riot Act had been read, but was inaudible to the majority of the crowd]. All had been preconcerted, prearranged'. The peaceful demonstrators were 'sabred, stabbed, shot, pressed down, trampled down by horse and infantry; and in less than ten minutes the actual field was cleared of all but mounds of dead and dying'.

Architect's plans for St Peter's Square. The Radisson is on the far right

St Peter's Field is covered over today, and is surprisingly close to the city centre, stretching roughly from the G-Mex to the Friend's Meeting House. The event is marked by a rather mealy-mouthed plaque on the Radisson Hotel building, but plans are afoot for a more suitable memorial. The massacre also inspired Shelley’s great radical poem The Mask of Anarchy, with it’s rallying cry of ‘ye are many - they are few’, and the creation of The Guardian newspaper.

The Portico Library's 'lofty reading room'

Another interesting site featured in Banks' novel is the Portico Library. Her protagonist, Jabez Clegg (immortalised by the popular but now defunct student bar) is a 'well-formed, well-favoured man' with a passion for self-improvement. 'Of course,' Banks says, 'his library was restricted, and there were no institutions in Manchester at that time where young men of his class could meet for mutual improvement'. Clegg is introduced to Mr Ashton, a shareholder in the Library, which is described as 'a classic stone building' with 'its pillared facade and flight of steps, like an Ionic temple'. The young man is dazzled by 'the bookshelved, galleried walls of its lofty reading room'. The Portico nowadays shares its premises with a pub, but the lofty reading room is still open. Notable members have included Thomas de Quincey.

Tony Wilson's gravestone, at Southern Cemetary (photo from The Guardian)

The original manuscript of Banks' novel is now stored in Manchester's historic Chetham's Library, alongside Karl Marx's desk. Linking old and new Manchester, the inscription on Tony Wilson’s gravestone comes from The Manchester Man: ‘Mutability is the epitaph of worlds / Change alone is changeless / People drop out of the history of a life as of a land though their work or their influence remains’

The Cotton Famine

Lincoln in Platt Fields

Hidden away in a side street just off Albert Square is one of the stranger sights in Manchester – a twenty foot statue of Abraham Lincoln. Originally intended to stand outside the Houses of Parliament, it was rejected for not looking statesmanlike enough, and was instead sent North, in recognition of the hardships that Manchester had endured during the American Civil War. A Union blockade of the Southern ports prevented the shipment of cotton to Britain, putting a stop to the city’s vital industry, and leaving thousands of workers near destitute. The statue was unveiled in 1919, in Platt Fields Park, before being moved to its present location in 1986.

Lincoln today

The base of the statue quotes a letter from Lincoln to the people of Britain, in which he recognised ‘the sufferings which the working people of Manchester… are called to endure in this crisis’. A year into the war, a third of the workforce was out of work, as mills closed their doors. These sufferings are the subject of King Cotton, a 1947 novel by Thomas Armstrong. Originally a 1,000 page, three volume epic, it is generally available today only in heavily abridged form, if at all. The book is extremely melodramatic, and Armstrong is unafraid of laying on the sentiment with a trowel, as in this piece of scene-setting: ‘Lancashire, where the pale and hollow faces of the children were the most tragic aspect of the Cotton Famine, was slowly and relentlessly dying. The America Civil War seemingly unending, all she could pray for was a miracle’.

Although the novel is a little light on descriptions of identifiable locations, Armstrong does give glimpses of life in the small satellite communities of what would now be Greater Manchester, describing towns which were ‘silent and still as though blighted, where the pawnbrokers’ were stacked high… the new co-op had to dispense with its shopman and lad in a desperate struggle to keep its head above water… spinners and manufacturers and professional men went into bankruptcy by the score’.

Alexandra Park, Whalley Range

He also writes about the charitable relief supplied by the local cotton masters (who might have done more for the mill workers had they not been hoarding supplies of good quality cotton for export): ‘for five days, too, processions of the unemployed, headed by clergymen and stewards with white rosettes, walked in formation to the Town Hall and other public buildings for a Christmas Dinner, each marcher wearing on his or her shoulder a long blue ribbon’. Eventually, following riots in Dukinfield, Ashton and Stalybridge, a large public works programme was developed to bring work to the city, giving us the likes of Alexandra Park.According to Wikipedia, the initial purpose of Alexandra Park was to 'deter the working men of Manchester from the alehouses during their day off', which was obviously a roaring success.